Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal
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About this ebook
“Funny, touching, tragic….A remarkable tale of corruption, child trafficking and civil war in a far away land—and one man’s extraordinary quest to reunite lost Nepalese children with their parents.”
—Neil White, author of In the Sanctuary of Outcasts
Little Princes is the epic story of Conor Grennan’s battle to save the lost children of Nepal and how he found himself in the process. Part Three Cups of Tea, part Into Thin Air, Grennan’s remarkable memoir is at once gripping and inspirational, and it carries us deep into an exotic world that most readers know little about.
Conor Grennan
Conor Grennan is the author of the New York Times bestselling and #1 international bestselling memoir Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal. The memoir shares Grennan’s humanitarian work as the founder of Next Generation Nepal (NGN), a nonprofit organization dedicated to reconnecting trafficked children with their families in Nepal. Little Princes has been shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, was the winner of the GoodReads 2011 Best Travel and Outdoors Award, and has been translated into 15 languages. Following publication, Grennan spoke about the book across North America and particularly enjoyed sharing his story with young people at secondary schools and colleges. For his work with the trafficked children of Nepal, Grennan was recognized by The Huffington Post as a 2011 Game Changer of the Year. In 2014, he was also named a recipient of the Unsung Heroes of Compassion, which was awarded to him by the Dalai Lama. Grennan is the dean of MBA students at the NYU Stern School of Business. Currently he resides in New Canaan, Connecticut, with his wife, Liz, and his two children, Finn and Lucy.
Read more from Conor Grennan
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Reviews for Little Princes
58 ratings102 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5When the author decided to volunteer at an orphanage in Nepal for three months, he had no idea how deeply he would become involved with the children, nor that he would make it his mission to rescue children who had been trafficked. I loved this book. The children's stories were compelling, and the children were so charming and resilient.The only drawback is that is is similar to Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen, which I loved, but whose veracity was called into question. That is why I read this more as fiction rather than non-fiction. Still, I know that there is a large kernal of truth to the book. I'm sure that child trafficking does go on in the manner described, and is often times even more horrible. Nepal was, and still is, mostly unstable. I don't think that those facts can be disputed.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book is a great testament to the will of the human spirit and the courage to confront adversity in a non-violent manner. There is plenty to love within the story, especially when considering that the children and people of Nepal, a country considered to be more agrarian and traditional than others, can be humble and happy with the simple things in life. Many of the characters enjoy pop culture phenomena such as Bollywood, but on the other hand, can be so content with a soccer ball made of burlap and newspaper.
Overall, the book is able to accomplish everything it sets out to, but for anyone looking for guns blazing and a great deal of violence, you will need to look elsewhere. The one character that is meant to be despised adds a bit of intensity to an otherwise straightforward day-to-day memoir about an American man's attempt to bring about change for the innocent people of Nepal. The particular villainous character is a child trafficker, and as an outside observer, you will want to pull for the good guys and see an ultimate downfall to the oppressors of the story. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Conor Grennan thought that spending three months in Nepal volunteering at an orphanage would make him seem exciting, soulful, and more appealing to women he might meet in bars. He did not expect that those three months would lead to an entirely new career: saving children trafficked in Nepal, and getting them home to their families. This book tells his story, from his first arrival at Little Princes orphanage, where he's dogpiled by enthusiastic children, to his founding of Next Generation Nepal, a charity dedicated to returning children home.Grennan is a charming, funny, and self-deprecating writer, and you sympathize immediately with his realization that he is entirely out of his depth helping take care of eighteen orphans in a foreign country. There's more to this story, however. Grennan learns that in many cases, these children are not orphans, but were taken from their families by a man who promised to get them an education and good care - often after demanding every penny the family could scrape together for a fee. The children are then used as beggars, or as bait for tourists who donate money for their "care". If they are lucky, they end up in places like Little Princes, though they rarely, if ever, return to their real families.The story at the heart of this book is often a dark one, and Grennan does not shy away from it. However, he avoids melodrama - the emotions of the children and their families are honest, clear, and never overdone. Along the way, we get to know the children - by turns funny, smart, and always fully-realized little people. We also travel across Nepal, a country torn by a civil war, where broad sections of the population live in dire poverty in the shadows of the towering Himalayas. I was gripped by this book from the first pages, and tore through it as quickly as possible. Sometimes it made me laugh out loud, usually at Grennan's fish-out-of-water experiences in Nepal, or at the playful children at Little Princes. And sometimes it made me cry, as families who had not heard from their children for years were reunited with them at last.Overall, this is a fantastic book - Grennan is a engaging writer, and his story is inherently compelling. I recommend this book highly to anyone with an interest in foreign cultures, the needs of children, or just a really well-told story.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I finally finished reading this book. I had started earlier but due to a family illness I had to postpone reading Little Princes until now. What a magnificent book!!!!!! By far, this is the best true story that I have ever read. The story of the Nepalese children is gripping and shocking and wonderful and incredible. What Conor and Farid accomplished is a story well worth reading and Conor's humor which is intermingled throughout the book is delightful.I highly recommend this book to everyone and I am off to see how I can support NGN in any way that I can.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It’s been a long time since I picked up a book I absolutely could not put down until I gulped down the whole thing. Only because I had to do trivial things like eat, bathe, and work, did I ever put Little Princes down in the three days I took to read it. Grennan is honest about his trepidation in the beginning of having to take care of the children but maintains his sense of humor throughout. In simple prose, Grennan brings you right into the lives of these lost children and the people of Nepal. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the plight of some of the world’s children.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A really fascinating and engaging book about Nepal, child trafficking, and finding yourself. It was a good lesson on another part of the world that we rarely hear about in America, and makes you reconsider your own 'problems.' But even while writing about really sad situations, the book maintained an overall heartwarming tone and at times was laugh-out-loud funny. The people are all well described and characterized making the story really come to life. Very similar in many ways to Three Cups of Tea but better written. I did wish, however, that there were more details about the formation of the organization and description of how he raised money and got it off the ground. It all seemed to come together so easily, which probably isn't true. And then at the end there was mention of his saying goodbye to all the staff at his orphanage, yet none of these people had been mentioned before--I kept imagining only he and Farid running it. He also mentioned needing to go back to New York to help with some fundraisers--did he have a staff there? For a book raising money for an organization, it would have been interesting to know a little more about it, along with the narrative.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I truly enjoyed reading 'Little Princes'. This book is about the volunteer experience of author Conor Grennan in an orphanage in Nepal. When he first sets out to go to Nepal he thinks this experience will only serve as a resume booster and to impress other people, but in the end the experience changes him. Working with the orphaned children touches him so deeply that he eventually decides to create "Next Generation Nepal" an organization which helps to reconnect trafficked Nepalese children with their parents. It's a raw and honest account and the author isn't afraid to admit his mistakes and talk about his struggles. It's an inspiring and captivating read. Highly recommended!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mr. Grennan shows the reader what it means to care, really care. He not only rescued Nepali children from trafficking, but reunited them with their families at his own peril. His bravery was amazing and only out measured by his compassion. The book had the added bonus of a delightful love story.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I bought this last week... sat down to flip through it... and then, as they say on teh internets, "I accidentally the whole thing!!1!".This is one of those memoir/travel/world issue books, in this case written by a young man who'd intended to spend all his savings on a trip around the world before heading back to his comfortable life... but found himself so impacted by the children at an orphanage in Nepal where he volunteered, that he ended up making that his life's work instead.The book is fascinating, heartbreaking, and hopeful. I don't have a whole lot to say about it, but I guarantee that your heart will pound and your jaw will drop as Grennan and the other orphanage volunteers discover a child trafficking ring, try to break the trafficker's power, and do absolutely crazy things like hike across Nepal to find the parents of the children who, truth be told, are not orphans at all (not a spoiler, it's on the back of the book). One of the most incredible sections of the book is when Grennan goes searching for seven children he'd seen inside a woman's house... the children had been hidden there forcibly by a child trafficker, and Grennan found a safe place to extract the children to. But by the time the rescuers arrived, the children were gone. Rather than give them up for lost among the millions of Nepali children, Grennan vows to find them. All of them.This is one book you don't want to miss.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I was prepared to like this book. What is not to like? A story of a man who goes to Nepal and finds his calling to help the children of the country at first in the orphanages and eventually trying to reunite them with their parents. It sounds wonderful doesn't it? And it is, but it is so much more. I was struck with the fact that the author is very open in the beginning that he first went to Nepal to help in an orphanage just to have something to talk about or put on his resume. Pretty selfish isn't it? But who isn't like that? Honestly?Then something changes, the children creep into Conor's heart and begin to bless him as he helps out in the children's home. As Conor learns more about the civil war in the country and the people that take the children from their parents to a life of slavery, you see Conor change and then he wants to help change the country and the children. The story is gripping. I had a hard time putting it down. I wanted to know what challenge Conor would get through next. Would he find the children, would he find the parents and just what could he do in this poor country where children are taken from their parents with the guise of helping them find a better life, but in reality are sold into child slavery.Through fund-raising and sheer will, Conor accomplished most of his goals with his friend Farid and help of others with other organizations in Nepal. He started a non-profit, Next Generation Nepal to help these children, to start his own home for them and with the help of others he is accomplishing his goals still to this day. It is just a marvelous tale of things happening for him and the children at just the right time. Of course there are trials, but Conor grows and learns to accept things as they happen.And the book is not only about his journey to help the children of Nepal, but it also has glimpses of his personal life at the time. I loved every aspect of this book and I hope Conor Grennan writes another book as he continues his plight to help these children and parents in Nepal. I love that this book opens up this struggle to the world and we as readers can see what is going on and find ways to help as well. The book is inspiring, uplifting and just amazing. I already know it will be one of my top reads of the year.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I haven't been moved by a story like I was with Conor Grennan's in a long time. Perhaps it was becasue I am a parent, but I don't think so. This well written memoir tells the story of the three plus years the author spent working in Nepal with children who were victims of child traffikers and the organization he was compelled to start, Next Generation Nepal, which works to reunite these children with their families. It is an amazing story, a kind that if written as ficiton, critics would criticize as too unbelievable. It is heart wrenching at times, more than once I found myself with tears in my eyes. But it is also a story filled with humor and determination, and hope and grace. I can only say I am so glad I read this story. Do yourself a favor and read it too.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Shocking but beautiful.This was an excellent book, certainly deserving of its comparison to Three Cups of Tea (Greg Mortenson).From the start I liked the author and his self depreciating explantion for his visit to Nepal - a bit of volunteering would make the whole exercise of world travel, seem more valid. Little did he know what a profound effect the children would have on him.He's a typical American lad when he arrives at the Little Princes Orphanage in Nepal, he has had no previous contact with children and is baffled by the behaviour of the eighteen youngsters who launch themselves at him as he steps through the gate. In spite of their tough lives, these children are adorable and Connor settles down to the routine that is to be his life for the next 3 months.Most volunteers do their 3 month stint and then leave, but the children get under his skin and he decides to pay them another visit before returning to America.It was around this time that he discovered that the children were not really orphans but victims of child trafficking, the majority of them having living parents.And what was his response? He threw himself whole-heartedly into a search for their parents in the rugged terains of Nepal.I couldn't put this book down, it was a fantastic read, all the better for being true.It is our book group choice for next week and I am really looking forward to sharing it. A book that everyone should read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When Conor Grennan graduates from college, he decides he's going to use his life savings to travel around the world for a year before getting down to business and finding a job. Though he's mostly a free spirit and just wants to see the sights, he'll spend the first three months volunteering at a children's home in Nepal. Grennan doesn't sugarcoat things when he admits that this plan took shape because he wanted to impress his friends, family and colleagues. But when Conor arrives at The Little Princes Children's Home in Nepal, his world begins to change. At first scared of the lovable mob of children that tackle him to the ground, Conor begins to interact with them on a deep and paternal level that leaves his heart wide open.All these children are the victims of child trafficking. Their parents, living in some of the most remote and poor villages in the world, were tricked into paying a benefactor to house, feed and educate them, hoping that their children will have a better fate than they would have had they stayed in the village. After collecting the children and the money, this malevolent benefactor uses the children as bait to attract foreign donations, ostensibly for the children's care. These children are then abandoned at random villages where they often become malnourished and ill. When the directors of The Little Princes Children's Home eventually come into possession of them, they are finally safe and able to begin a new life. But it's not always that easy, as more and more parents are being lured into giving their children away to the evil man known as Golkka. Although Conor and his colleagues wish to reunite these children with their families, scores of children show up at the doors of the children's home and others like it. When Conor takes on a double mission to find seven stolen children and to reunite several others with their family and village, he steps into a world of danger and corruption. Will he be able to find those unlucky seven and reunite the others with their families before time runs out? As Conor gets increasingly invested in the children and their fates, his life begins to change and he comes to realize that his home is there, in the children's home, with the kids he has come to love and cherish. Though at times heartbreaking, this tale is an ultimately uplifting story about a group of children that were once lost but now have been miraculously found.I haven't read a lot of human interest memoirs over the past year, but I was really excited about this one. First off because Grennan seemed to be such a regular person, such an everyman, if you will. It was refreshing to see that his reasons for the trip to Nepal were essentially selfish but ended up having such positive and far-reaching effects. Conor also has the distinct ability to be genuinely funny writing about the children he comes in contact with and a good portion of this book made me smile. Whenever there was a scene of Conor interacting with the children, there was bound to be a flash of revelation from him, and as he grew to know them all, they came to love and respect him as a sort of surrogate parent. Conor also works with a few other volunteers from other parts of the world and this small handful of people become the children's be all and end all.It was sad to see how the parents were tricked into believing that by paying Golkka to take away their children, they would have a better life. Most of the children that were trafficked were simply meal tickets for the dangerous man, and after they had outlived their usefulness, they were relegated to a shack on the back edge of someone's property along with dozen of others to starve and become seriously ill. At times they were sold into child slavery, and finding these children became the toughest obstacle that Conor could ever face. The sad part was that even though Conor recovered a few dozen, there were countless others that he couldn't save. It was a sad testament that so many of these cases could have been avoided had the parents only been aware of what Golkka was really all about, and even sadder that it continued to happen, even after the story had ended.One of the hardest things to digest was the fact that the parents of the trafficked children could not take them back into their homes, even after they had been found and rehabilitated. Most of the time, they lived such hardscrabble existences that it was impossible for them to take these children home again. Often they were content to leave the children in Conor and the other volunteers' hands, confident that they would have better lives then they themselves could have given to their own offspring. Though there were many reconciliations, most of the children ended up staying in the children's home because the community could not feasibly absorb them back into the fold. The children didn't seem scarred by this though, and most of them were just happy to know that their parents were still alive, as many of them had been told that all of their family had died.I thought this story would be mainly given over to the trafficked children of Nepal, but to my surprise and delight, Conor finds a person to love throughout his mission to save the children. I really relished this aspect of the story because I believed that Conor was a really good guy and deserving of the love that he so obviously needed. The woman in question was a pretty rare specimen as well, and I believe there was something more than chance that brought them together. The children also found it gratifying that Conor had fallen in love, and grew to love his intended just as much as they loved him, which warmed my heart as well.This was a very interesting book not only in the story it told, but in the way it was presented and the feelings that it evoked in me. It was funny, sad and timely, and had the added benefit of starring the enigma that is Conor Grennan. I would urge anyone who is curious about the plight of child trafficking in Nepal to read this book, and as an added incentive, a portion of the proceeds from this book go directly to the Little Princes Children's Home. This book would also make a great choice for book clubs. A very touching read, filled with altruism. Recommended!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Princes begins with a self centered decision by Connor Grennan to volunteer at a Nepalese orphanage, and continues through his experiences with the children, often funny, to his efforts to reunite children with their families. The book highlights the plight of Nepalese children, not orphans, but victims of child trafficking during Nepal’s civil war. Amidst poverty, ignorance and civil war, Nepalese parents paid money on the promise that their children would be educated and would have a better life. Mr. Grennan’s determination to reunite trafficked children with their parents sparked the creation of Next Generation Nepal, a non-profit and the beneficiary of proceeds of the book. The story of the children and their parents is compelling; Mr. Grennan’s story much less so. Overall, the book is well worth reading.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal by Conor Grennan is a book very much in the vein of Three Cups of Tea. Grennan first went to Nepal in 2004 for what was supposed to be a relatively brief (few month) stay at the start of a one year trip around the world. Volunteering at the orphanage outside Kathmandu was supposed to be his "good deed" before his big, fun, responsibility-free adventure. Grennan did leave Nepal after his stint was up, but couldn't forget the children he had met and cared for there. He returned to Nepal again and again, eventually founding a non-profit, Next Generation Nepal, opening a second children's home, and beginning a quest to find the families of the children within the two homes. (Most of the children were not truly orphans, having instead been trafficked by men who promised to take the children to safety in Kathmandu for large sums of money from the parents).This was a captivating and engaging read. I finished it in two days and never wanted to put it down. It's not being published until February, but I highly recommended it once it is available.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5My pastor often talks about ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things and I can think of no better person to exemplify this belief than the author of Little Princes, Conor Grennan.You see, Conor is just a typical guy. He is bored with his job, enjoys hitting the bars with his friends and yearns to traverse the globe. So his friends are not too surprised when he quits his job, withdraws his life savings from his account and decides to take a year off to travel around the world. What they are surprised about is the two month stint he has planned in Nepal, volunteering at Little Princes, an orphanage in Godawari but he surmises it will be a great way to impress the ladies at the bars upon his return. When he arrives at Little Princes he is immediately welcomed by the children and is taken aback by their openness and cheerful attitudes despite extreme poverty and the loss of their parents. Before his two month stint ends he discovers that the children he has come to love are not orphans at all but victims of a child trafficker who received money from their parents with the promise that he is taking them to a better city where they will have a good education, plenty of food and a good home. Many, however, are simply deposited on the streets or sold into servitude. Conor vows to return and search for their parents.Conor proceeds to recount his story with the ease of a good friend sharing his adventure over a cup of tea. It will include surprises, suspense, romance, danger, humor and self discovery. It has all the elements of a great novel yet with the authenticity of a real life experience, an experience that changes the lives of so many people and is so appreciated. My ER copy indicates that the finished product will include some of the photographs taken by Conor and certainly must be seen to fully understand what he has done for these young children.Little Princes is a feel good book, it is a book that will remind even the most jaded of us that there are ordinary people like you who do extraordinary things and even may inspire the reader to find a way to make a positive difference in the world.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I have read a number of books over the years, both fiction and non-fiction, set in Asian countries close to the Himalayas. The majesty of this area of the world has me in thrall without me ever leaving my chair. The magnificence of nature here sometimes overshadows the human element but in the hands of the right writer, I can be equally captured by the reality of the people who live in these rugged, remote, and often terribly poor countries. But I didn't really have a good sense of the turmoil and poverty in the midst of all the grandeur, especially in Nepal. This book has changed that a bit for me and certainly put a human face (or faces) on the sad and desperate social situation facing this small mountainous country sandwiched between India and China.After eight years working for the EastWest think tank, Conor Grennan decided that he wanted to spend a year going around the world. To make his trip seem less frivolous, he signed up to start his journey in Nepal, volunteering at an orphange for 3 months. He didn't really have any experience with children and had very little idea what to expect at the Little Princes Children's Home. But working at an orphanage was certainly admirable and staved off criticism for his around the world year. At the outset, Grennan had no concept of how much the first three months of his journey would change him and how the children at the orphanage would burrow into his heart.Coming back to Nepal after his year in the world, he discovered, quite by accident, that the children at Little Princes (named for the St. Exupery character) were not in fact orphans. They had been rescued from child traffickers. And it was the desperate, unsuccessful race to pluck seven more trafficked children from the dire situation in which they were living, even as the civil war escalated throughout the country, that drove Grennan and his colleague Farid to create the NGO Next Generation Nepal. Their initial vow to find these seven children, stop the abomination of child trafficking, and find the families of all the lost children remains a driving force behind the organization.Ten years of civil war in Nepal caused more casualties than just among those fighting. When men went through remote villages and offered parents the opportunity to send their children to safety in Kathmandu, away from Maoist rebels who would forcibly conscript the children into their armies, to a place with abundant food, to a place where their children could receive an education, the parents gave everything they had to these men in return for the promise of a better life for the children. Unfortunately, the truth was that they paid these child traffickers who only turned around and sold the children into slavery, abandoned them to starve, or worse. It is these stolen children that Next Generation Nepal seeks to find and reunite with their families.Part travelogue, part coming of age tale, part love story, part social conscience, part crusade, part call to action, this tale is wonderfully told and completely engrossing. Grennan is honest about the hard realities of Nepalese life, the corruption found there, and the oftentimes ineffectual politics. But he writes beautifully, affectionately, and from the heart about the people, the place, and the children he carries in his heart forever. His self-deprecating humor shines throughout the narrative making for a highly entertaining read. As Grennan experiences life, learns and changes personally, searches nearly inaccessible villages for parents of the lost children, celebrates successes, and agonizes over failures in this struggling and impoverished country, the reader is swept into the childrens' lives as well as into Grennan's own developing personal life. I dare anyone turning these pages not to fall in love with the enchanting imps at Little Princes and invite them to root for Grennan as he makes the world a better place, one child, one family at a time.A portion of the proceeds from the sale of each copy of Little Princes will be donated to Next Generation Nepal and will help go towards getting more of these lost children out of the hands of child traffickers and home again.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I found this book to be a heartfelt story of one man's unexpected and somewhat unplanned mission to reunite children impacted by human trafficking. This is just the sort of book which should be required reading for college students to show how one determined person can make such a huge difference. I enjoyed the blending of the cultures and the description of the country, its traditions, and the people. The author included just enough background on the conflicts and politics of Nepal without overshadowing the human impact.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What a great way to start the year. This book is fantastic.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book seems like two memoirs recklessly pulled into one. The first would be of the author's involvement with the trafficked children of Nepal and the establishment of a charity to help them find their homes. The other memoir would be how the author toured the world, haphazardly involved himself in a humanitarian effort, found his true love, and lived a happy ending. I found the stories of the trafficked children engaging and somewhat emotional. Additionally, the background given on the people of Nepal and the country's history were enlightening. I don't want to downplay the humanitarian efforts put forth by the author in helping these children; however, there was something that made his actions seem nonchalant and accidental once he started describing finding his now-wife and the ending to his life in Nepal, as though the children and the charity were the means to an end and not substantial in their own right. Had the author spent less time detailing his obsession with his wife and more time detailing the families and children, this book may have wonderful. As it is, it is still a great read.The main reason you should buy this book: part of the proceeds support the Next Generation Nepal charity. Secondarily, you learn yet another story that has been glossed over - perhaps never covered - by the American media.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5While the author's journey is cliche, I found the tales of this poverty-stricken country endearing. The author starts out like a person trying to "find himself" and ends up with a new path through life. The stories about the children of Nepal pulled at my heart. Grennan does a great job of creating the characters and helping the reader feel an attachment to them. His tales of the treks to places unknown were captivating and left me wanting to know more about these journies and how he searched for families. As a reader, I wanted to know more about raising the funds for this venture or how the author funded his journey from the start.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Conor takes a three-month volunteer job at a children’s home in Nepal. Turned out to be a little longer than three months…It’s a refreshing story of someone who admits his ignorance—about children, Nepali customs, the challenges faced by that society, and the reasons behind difficult choices. But Conor learns. He grows as a person. He admits mistakes and begins again. And throughout it all, he has one goal: to help innocent children who cannot help themselves. It’s a heartwarming, truly touching story. I highly recommend it. As a bonus, part of the proceeds from the sale of the book go toward helping reunite children with their families and stopping the outrageous act of child trafficking.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This memoir is packed with adventure, humor, romance, and stories of incredibly joyful, loving children. It is so refreshing to read a story of a man who is willing to go to bat for children against such incredible odds and come out on top. What a beautiful story!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A terrific story, written in a witty, wry tone that had me hooked from early on. I sure hope it's true.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is the story of the some of the lost children of Nepal - children who have been taken from their parents under false pretenses. Children who are made to work as slaves to the child trafficers who see them as a commodity, like a bag of rice. This is the story one man's attempt to make a difference in these childrens lives.Conor Grennan doing a volunteer stint at the Little Princes Children's Home Orphanage is out of his comfort zone. but he is only going to be there 3 months as he plans on traveling around the world. But something happens - he becomes attached to the children and their stories. "Little Princes" is about Grennan's attempt to find the parents of these children. It is not easy in war torn Nepal, especially when the children are from villages in the mountains and the only way to get there is to walk.Heartfelt, funny and well written, this book is a must read for those that believe that good things still do happen.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5{{{sigh}}} sniff sniff... I will always remember this story! (blowing nose).It's an amazing, compelling journey of a brave, determined young man, Conor Grennan, set out to do whatever he could to save the children of Nepal. I sigh because I am still reeling over it. I would love to do what this man did. He had so much determination and will to walk, hike across the dangerous land to get to the homes of the saved children, to tell the parents their child are safe and alive. He doesn't stop there, he starts a non profit organization called Next Generation Nepal (click the link to take you to the website). From absolutely nothing, he had not a dime, he manages to raise enough money to start a home to save children. To save children from being sold and then left to be a slave or worse, to die of cold and starvation. An amazing, inspirational story that I highly recommend!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great book! It was a quick read (I read it on two airplane flights) and very engaging. Reading this was hearing about a corner of the world rarely discussed in mainstream media. Unless you're interested/involved in the current adoption plight there (families stuck while waiting for visas for their adopted children), Nepal likely doesn't cross most people's minds unless they're thinking of Everest. Grennan's story was wonderfully told, gripping, and terribly sad and frustrating in parts. It's not often that you read a book and then want to get on a plane to help out,but this one was compelling in that way. I hope this book does very well when released nationally.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I loved this book! I didn't want to set it down. I found it very easy to connect to Conor Grennan through his inviting writing style. As I read, I was over joyed, sad, worried, excited and it felt like I was right there in Nepal too. I would say if you liked Three Cups of Tea you would definately enjoy this book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I received this book as an early reviewer book. Little Princes is about a young American/Irish man, Conor, who spends time in Nepal working at an orphanage (for how it would look to others) during his "play year" around the world. While there, he becomes connected to the little children, who are not necessarily orphans at all, but victims of child traffickers taking advantage of parents trying to save their kids from the Maoist rebel army. The traffickers were paid huge sums (by village standards) to take the kids to safety, but instead they dumped them in illegal orphanages where the quality of care was horrid. Some of these children were rescued into orphanages like the one Conor was volunteering for, but many were not. Discovering this, Conor makes it his mission to help rescue, provide a home for, and help find the families of these children. The story and effort are heroic and well written; it is very reminiscent of Three Cups of Tea. My only complaint is that I find it hard to believe that *everything* this man touches succeeds. He is attempting to carry out these tasks in remote, under developed, and often corrupt areas of Nepal. Sure, his goal is commendable, but there must be parts of the story where he didn't have "just the right ally", or get lucky enough to be at the right place at just the right time, or be unable to track down every child's family; including these things in the book would make it more believable... as it is, it seems more like fiction where the entitled American can do anything, all live happily ever after and, by the way, boy gets girl.Since this was an early release, I'm hoping the final publication will include a map and photos.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Another book that I'm torn about how to review. The first half gets a solid 4 stars. The second half...maybe two. I forced myself to finish it (because in my quest to read 52 books this year, I didn't want to have wasted valuable reading time on a book I couldn't "count"!).
I truly enjoyed the first half. I've finally learned that books about other places can be pretty interesting. I liked learning more about the war and unrest in Nepal and specifically the child traffiking. Somehow, in the second half, though, the book became much less about the children and more about the author and his personal quest. I do "get", on some level, that this is as it should be; the book, after all, is about the author's experience. But based upon the title of the book itself, I expected (and would have preferred) it to be more about "the lost children of Nepal."
Book preview
Little Princes - Conor Grennan
Prologue
December 20, 2006
It was well after nightfall when I realized we had gone the wrong way. The village I had been looking for was somewhere up the mountain. In my condition, it would be several hours’ walk up a rocky trail, if we could even find the trail in the pitch-dark. My two porters and I had been walking for thirteen hours straight. Winter at night in the mountains of northwestern Nepal is bitterly cold, and we had no shelter. Two of our three flashlights had burned out. Worse, we were deep in a Maoist rebel stronghold, not far from where a colleague had been kidnapped almost exactly one year before. I would have shared this fact with my porters, but we were unable to communicate; I spoke only a few words of the local dialect.
Exhausted, I slumped down beside them. I zipped up my jacket and knotted my arms tightly around my chest to keep out the cold. Six days had passed since I split from my team. I had sent them home, back to their villages, promising them that I would be okay. My guide, Rinjin, tried to stay with me. Just to make sure the helicopter comes, he had said. I assured him everything would be fine and pushed him to leave with the others. The trek back to their villages would take the men several days, and they had been away from their families for almost three weeks. Rinjin had taken a last look at the empty sky, shaken his head at my stubbornness, and clasped my hand in farewell. Then he hurried to catch up with the others already descending the trail.
I reached into my bag, looking for food. I pushed aside the weather-beaten folder, crammed with my handwritten notes and photos of young children, children who had been taken from these mountains years before. The notes had been my only clues to finding their families in remote villages accessible only by foot.
Behind a crumpled, rain-stained map, my hand touched two tangerines—the last of our food. I passed them to the two porters.
I wondered how things would have been different if I hadn’t gotten hurt. Or if I hadn’t split from my team, or if I hadn’t decided to wait on that mountain for a helicopter that never came. It didn’t matter now. What did matter was figuring out how we would get through the night.
Part I
Art02.tifTHE LITTLE PRINCES
November 2004-January 2005
One
The brochures for volunteering in Nepal had said civil war. Being an American, I assumed the writers of the brochure were doing what I did all the time—exaggerating. No organization was going to send volunteers into a conflict zone.
Still, I made sure to point out that particular line to everybody I knew. An orphanage in Nepal, for two months,
I would tell women I’d met in bars. Sure, there’s a civil war going on. And yes, it might be dangerous. But I can’t think about that,
I would shout over the noise of the bar, trying to appear misty-eyed. I have to think about the children.
Now, as I left the Kathmandu airport in a beat-up old taxi, I couldn’t help but notice that the gate was guarded by men in camouflage. They peered in at me as we slowed to pass them, the barrels of their machine guns a few inches from my window. Outside the gate, sandbagged bunkers lined the airport perimeter, where young men in fatigues aimed heavy weapons at passing cars. Government buildings were wrapped in barbed wire. Gas stations were protected by armored vehicles; soldiers inspected each car in the mile-long line for gas.
In the backseat of the taxi, I dug the brochure out of my backpack and quickly flipped to the Nepal section. Civil war, it said again, in the same breezy font used to describe the country’s fauna. Couldn’t they have added exclamation points? Maybe put it in huge red letters, and followed it with No lie!
or Not your kind of thing!
How was I supposed to know they were telling the truth?
As we bounced along the potholed road, I turned longingly to the other opportunities in the volunteering brochure, ones that offered a six-week tour of duty in some Australian coastal paradise, petting baby koalas that were stricken—stricken!—with loneliness. I never could have gotten away with that. I needed this volunteering stint to sound as challenging as possible to my friends and family back home. In that, at least, I had succeeded: I would be taking care of orphans in one of the poorest countries in the world. It was the perfect way to begin my year-long adventure.
Nepal was merely the first stop in a one-year, solo round-the-world trip. I had spent the previous eight years working for the EastWest Institute, an international public policy think tank, out of their Prague office, and, later, the Brussels office. It had been my first and only job out of college, and I loved it. Eight years later, though, I was bored and desperately needed some kind of radical change.
Luckily, for the first time in my life, I had some real savings. I was raised in a thrifty Irish-American household; living in inexpensive Prague for six years allowed me to save much of my income. Moreover, I was single, had no mortgage or plans to get married or have kids any time in the next several decades. So I decided—rather quickly and rashly—to spend my entire net worth on a trip around the world. I couldn’t get much more radical than that. I wasted no time in telling my friends about my plan, confident that it would impress them.
I soon discovered that such a trip, while sounding extremely cool, also sounded unrepentantly self-indulgent. Even my most party-hardened friends, on whom I had counted to support this adventure, hinted that this might not be the wisest life decision. They used words I hadn’t heard from them before, like retirement savings
and your children’s college fund
(I had to look that last one up—it turned out to be a real thing). More disapproval was bound to follow.
But there was something about volunteering in a Third World orphanage at the outset of my trip that would squash any potential criticism. Who would dare begrudge me my year of fun after doing something like that? If I caught any flak for my decision to travel, I would have a devastating comeback ready, like: Well frankly Mom, I didn’t peg you for somebody who hates orphans,
and I would make sure to say the word orphans really loudly so everybody within earshot knew how selfless I was.
I looked out the dirty taxi window. Through the swarm of motorcycles and overcrowded buses, I saw a small park that had been converted into a base for military vehicles. Some children had gotten through the barbed wire fence and were playing soccer. The soldiers merely watched them, hands resting on their weapons. I took a last look at the photo of the lonely koalas, sighed, and put the brochure away. In two and a half months I would be far away from here, preferably on a conflict-free beach.
After a half hour of driving through choking traffic over a pockmarked slab of highway known as the Kathmandu Ring Road, then through a maze of smaller streets, I noticed the scene outside had changed. Moments earlier it had been a chaotic mass of poverty and pollution; this new neighborhood was almost peaceful in comparison. There were very few cars, save the occasional taxi. The shops had changed from selling household necessities like tools and plastic buckets and rice to selling more expensive, tourist-oriented things like carpets, prayer wheels, and mandalas, the beautifully detailed paintings of Buddhist and Hindu origin used by monks as a way of focusing their spiritual attention. Vendors leaned in the window as my taxi edged its way through them, offering carvings of elephants or wooden flutes or apples perched precariously on round trays. Bob Marley blared out of tinny speakers.
The biggest change was that the pedestrians were now overwhelmingly white. They fell into two broad categories: hippies in loose clothing, with beaded, kinky hair, or sunburned climbers in North Face trekking pants and boots heavy enough to kick through cinder blocks. There were no soldiers to be seen. We had arrived in the famed Thamel district.
There are really two Kathmandus: the district of Thamel and the rest. In the general madness of Nepal’s capital, Thamel is a six-block embassy compound for those who want to drink beer and eat pizza and meat that they pretend is beef but is almost certainly yak or water buffalo. Backpackers and climbers set up camp here before touring the local temples or hiking into the mountains for a trek or white-water rafting. It is safe and comfortable, with the only real danger being that the street vendors may well drive you to lunacy. It was like the Nepal that you might find at Epcot Center at Disney World. I finally felt at ease. I would spend my first hours in the Thamel district, and by God I was going to enjoy it.
Orientation for the volunteer program began the next day, held at the office of the nonprofit organization known as CERV Nepal. I sat with the other dozen volunteers, mostly Americans and Canadians, and tried to focus on the presentation. The presenter was speaking in slowly enunciated detail about Nepalese culture and history. The presentation was frightfully boring. I found it impossible to keep my attention focused on the speaker, even when I concentrated and dug my nails into the palms of my hands. By the second hour, I would hear phrases like Remember, this is Nepal, so whatever you do, try not to—
and then notice a leaf flittering past the window and get distracted again.
That changed about an hour and a half into the presentation when the entire group visibly perked up at the mention of the word toilet.
Travel to the developing world and you will quickly learn that toilets in the United States are the exception rather than the rule. I readily admit to my own cultural bias, but to me, toilets in America are the Bentleys of toilets, at the cutting edge of toilet technology and comfort, standing head and shoulders above what appeared to be the relatively primitive toilets of South Asia. Unfortunately, those toilets are often first discovered at terribly inopportune moments, sometimes at a full run after eating something less than sanitary, bursting through a restroom door to discover a contraption that you do not quite recognize. If there is ever a moment for panic, that is the moment.
So when I heard Deepak say You may have noticed toilets here are different
my ears twitched. Deepak then took a deep breath and said, Hari will now demonstrate how to use the squat toilet.
I wondered if I had heard that correctly.
Hari walked to the middle of the circle of suddenly alert volunteers. Jen, a girl from Toronto sitting a few feet away, summed up what everybody must have been thinking with a panicked whisper: Is he gonna crap in the room?
Hari reached for his belt. I heard somebody shout Oh no!
but I couldn’t take my eyes off the nightmare unfolding in front of me.
But wait—he was only miming undoing his belt. He then mimed lowering his trousers, mimed squatting down, mimed whistling for a few seconds, then mimed using an invisible water bucket to clean the areas that shall not be named. He stood up and gave a little voilà!
flourish, then quickly left the circle and walked past Deepak out the door, his face bright red.
Clearly Deepak outranked Hari.
I wanted to applaud. It was the first truly practical thing we’d learned. For months afterward, I often thought of Hari at those precise moments, and I silently thanked him every time I watched a hapless tourist step into a bathroom and saw their brow furrow as the door closed behind them.
The in-office orientation lasted just one day, and then we piled into the backs of old 4x4s and drove south out of Kathmandu toward the village of Bistachhap, where we would continue our week-long orientation. We would be placed with families, one volunteer per home, to get acclimated to village life in Nepal.
Bistachhap is a tiny village on the floor of a valley surrounded by what I would have called mountains back in the United States, rising about two thousand feet above the village. With the Himalaya in the background, though, they looked like good-sized hills. These hills formed the southern wall of the Kathmandu Valley. The valley floor was covered with rice paddies and terraced mustard fields, blooming in bright yellow. Bistachhap itself was little more than a small collection of about twenty-five homes, mostly mud but some concrete, a dirt path connecting them like the wire on a set of Christmas lights. The houses sat on the north side of the floor of the valley, each one providing a view of the rice paddies on the other side of the path. I was assigned to a concrete yellow house, which looked pretty snazzy sitting next to the mud ones, though inside revealed a simple structure. I had my own bedroom, a simple affair with a single bed on a mattress of straw and a swatch of handmade carpet spread out on the floor. It was clear that somebody else in the house had vacated their room for me.
After dropping my backpack in the room, I went to formally introduce myself to my host mother, proud to be able to use one of the three expressions I had learned in Nepali: Mero naam Conor ho.
My host mother, in the middle of her workday, was caught off guard by my apparent comprehension of her language. She dropped her water bucket and raised her hands over her head in excitement and launched into a monologue about God knows what. I took a step back and held up my hands, saying Whoa whoa whoa whoa!
for the entire time she spoke. In Nepali that must mean Continue! I completely understand you, and I enjoy this conversation!
because damn if she didn’t go on for several minutes, getting more and more excited, until her daughter, a little girl of perhaps six or seven, took my hand and dragged me away.
The daughter, whose name I would learn was Susmita, walked me out to the front porch and plopped down on a straw mat, inviting me to do the same. She pointed to the mat and said a word in Nepali, waiting for me to repeat it. I did so. Then she repeated this with the house, the door, the garden, and anything else she could think of. I repeated each word and let her correct me until I had nailed it. Her face lit up. She was going to teach me Nepali, and I was going to learn. She disappeared, returning a few moments later with her homework, wherein she drew a single character in Sanskrit over and over, as one might practice a capital B, pointing to each one for my benefit until her mother fetched her to help with dinner preparation.
Unsure of what to do, as I could see no other volunteers anywhere, I took a walk through the village. I called out Namaste!
to every villager I passed, and usually received a Namaste
in return, though they seemed oddly reluctant.
This turned out to be, not surprisingly, my own fault. I had thought Namaste
was like Hey there!
or What’s up?
but I would later learn that it was a far more formal greeting than this. Yoga enthusiasts will recognize it and may even know the translation, which is along the lines of I salute the God within you.
Heavy stuff. Yet I yelled it to everybody, the same way you might yell Dude!
or My man!
to your buddies. I accompanied it with a big friendly wave. I said it to children. I said it to people I’d just seen four minutes earlier. I saw a stray dog and bent down to give him a scratch behind the ears and saluted the God within him. I saluted the God within a mother carrying a baby, then saluted the God within the baby.
Down the path, I saw my host mother outside looking around for me. She recognized me from a distance and waved me in. I was late for dinner. I followed her into what I supposed was the kitchen. There was a mud floor, an open fire in the corner, and two boys of perhaps nine years old sitting Indian style on the floor next to Susmita, who sat next to their father. The boys patted the ground next to them happily, pleased that I was joining them. The mother, meanwhile, had squatted next to the large pot. She picked up a metal plate and dumped what looked like several pounds of rice onto it for the family, and placed it in front of me. I was about to take some and pass it along, when I saw her preparing an even bigger mountain of rice and placing it in front of the father.
After placing similar plates in front of her children, she took a ladle out of the other pot and poured steaming hot lentil soup over the rice on our plates: daal bhat, literally, lentils with rice.
Daal bhat is eaten by about 90 percent of Nepalese people, twice a day. The mother added some curried vegetables to my plate, at the same time shooing away a stray chicken.
When everyone was served, the mother put her hand to her mouth, indicating that I should eat. I nodded in thanks, then looked around for some kind of utensil. There was no utensil. I watched the rest of the family stick their hands into the hot goo, mash it up, and begin shoveling it into their mouths.
After maybe half a minute watching my host family eat, my jaw hanging slack near my collarbone, I noticed that they had stopped eating, one by one, and were staring at me, wondering why I wasn’t eating. I came to my senses. I had been with my host family for all of ten minutes and was on the verge of causing some irrevocable offense. I forced a smile, took a chunk of rice and daal and a smidge of some kind of pickled vegetable, and placed it gently into my mouth.
It was spicy. Spicy in the way that your eyes instantly flood with tears and your sinuses feel like the last flight of the Hindenburg, as if somebody inside my skull had ordered a full evacuation. The children started giggling. Even the chicken stopped pecking to watch what would happen next.
What happened next was that I opened my mouth to breathe, but the back draft only fanned the flames in my throat. I grasped for the tin cup of water next to me, oblivious to the shouts of the father, mother, and three children, and realized, too late, that my hand was burning because the water in the tin cup was still boiling.
I opened my mouth and let out a kind of Mwaaaaaaa
sound, very loudly, and used my hands, so recently used as eating utensils, to fan myself, spraying a light mist of rice and lentils into my face and hair. I opened my eyes to see the family trying to decide if I needed assistance, and if so, what that assistance might look like.
You can’t go through that experience with a family and not become closer. The older of the two boys, whose name I learned was Govardhan, had a Nepali-English phrasebook with him, and we had the most basic of conversations, the one where you say Nepal is beautiful, then, because this is a phrase that I apparently got right, they began asking if the house was beautiful, if the mountains were beautiful, if the chicken was beautiful, if their mother’s hair was beautiful, and so on until everybody had finished their pile of rice.
I had eaten as fast as I could through all this; my stomach felt like I’d swallowed a bag of sand. I looked down to see that I had made it through just over a third of my food. I pointed at the rice and told the mother that the rice was truly beautiful, but that my stomach (I pointed at my belly button) was not beautiful. She laughed and with a wave of her hand excused me. I waved a good night Namaste!
and headed up to my room.
I walked outside later to brush my teeth from the water bucket, as there was no running water. I was careful not to swallow any. I brushed slowly under the thick coat of stars. The quiet was absolute. The neighbors’ homes were lit by candles, with an occasional lightbulb shining in the windows of the wealthier houses. I could just make out another volunteer two houses down, also brushing his teeth using an old water bucket, also staring straight up at the stars, and maybe also wondering if he was really here, if he was really standing on the opposite side of the planet from his home. This was one of those moments I wanted to capture, to hold on to and to stare into like a snow globe. This world was already completely different from anything I had ever experienced—and this was just day one.
The immersion week was useful in getting us at least partially accustomed to this strange new culture. The most valuable part of it was practicing Nepali with Susmita. She made sounds slowly, pointing at pictures, and I repeated them. When I tried to show off my knowledge of animal names for the rest of the family on my final night in Bistachhap, they frowned and consulted each other, trying to work out what I was saying.
Finally I took Govardhan out behind the house, next to the outhouse, and pointed at the goat. I said my word, which sounded like Faalllaaaagh.
He shook his head: Hoina, hoina,
he said, which I knew meant no.
He pointed at the goat. Kasi,
he said.
Kasi? That sounded nothing like faalllaaaagh. Had I gotten the wrong animal?
Who say?
Govardhan asked in English. It was the first English he had spoken.
I told him Susmita, his little sister, had told me. His eyes popped wide, and he literally doubled over laughing and ran in to tell his family. I discovered later that Susmita, my lovely little teacher, was deaf.
Hari, of toilet-miming fame, picked me up from Bistachhap in the jeep and threw my backpack in the back. He pointed across the valley.
That is Godawari,
he said, pronouncing it go-DOW-ry. That is where you will be volunteer. I will see you very often there—I work there also. I am part-time house manager for the orphanage where you go.
I had seen the house from a distance during a trek up one of the large hills, but I knew little about it. The orphanage was called the Little Princes Children’s Home, named after the French novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince. It had been started by a French woman in her late twenties.
I nodded and made a vague comment about how excited I was to get started. But my mind was elsewhere. It would be two weeks before I would actually show up for orphan duty; before that, I would be fulfilling my dream of trekking to Everest Base Camp. I had been moved by Jon Krakauer’s harrowing account of climbing Mt. Everest in a storm in 1996, on a day when eight climbers perished. The summit of the world’s tallest mountain is just shy of thirty thousand feet—the cruising altitude of a Boeing 747. I would never in my life have the strength to climb the mountain, but I was dying to see it. When I learned that Everest was in Nepal (a country that I had previously confused with Tibet), I decided it was the perfect country to volunteer in—I could combine my volunteering experience with a trek to Base Camp. I was in good physical condition, so it wasn’t as if I was going to keel over from altitude sickness. I couldn’t wait to get started.
When I wasn’t lying on the side of the trail, winded and dry-heaving from altitude sickness, I managed to take a lot of photos. There was no shortage of things to photograph: the trek up to Base Camp was spectacular. Every step is a step skyward, through simple Buddhist villages that seem to be glued to the sides of impossibly tall mountains. The Sherpa people are native to that region, having come over the mountains from Tibet hundreds of years earlier. They are traditionally Buddhist. In every village you could see carved oversized Sanskrit prayers chiseled into boulders and blackened, like tattoos. Trekkers were expected to walk to the left of these Mani Stones, clockwise, to respect the faith of the local community.
With the extraordinary Himalayas taking up most of the sky, it was difficult to keep an eye on the trail. Yet keeping an eye on the trail was essential to survival. Enormous, shaggy yaks, laden with hundreds of pounds of climbing gear, would come barreling down the trail, seeming not to notice humans at all. The first few I saw were a novelty, but after that we loathed them as dangerous pains in the ass.
But there were bigger dangers. In the village of Lukla, the start and end point of the Everest Base Camp trek, a few dozen soldiers manned an outpost. Everest National Park (known in Nepal as Sagarmatha National Park) was one of the few regions left in Nepal over which the royal government claimed control, but even that was under constant threat by Maoist rebels who controlled the surrounding area. As I waited for a small plane to take me back to Kathmandu, sirens blared and soldiers ran past the door of the tea shop, automatic weapons in hand. There was no fighting, and I got the impression that it may have all been a drill. But when I got back to Kathmandu, I decided I had seen just about enough of the rest of this country. The Kathmandu Valley was safe from rebel attack; I wouldn’t leave again for the duration of my three-month stay in Nepal.
I had one full day to relax in the Thamel district of Kathmandu. But there was no more putting it off. I reported for duty the next day at the CERV office.
We’re ready to go—are you excited?
Hari asked.
I sure am!
I practically shouted, because I believed that to be the only answer I could give without sounding like I was having second thoughts about this whole orphanage thing.
We drove to the village of Godawari. It was only six miles south of Kathmandu, but it felt like a different world. Inside Kathmandu’s Ring Road, people, buildings, buses, and soldiers were all crammed into a small space. There was almost nothing peaceful about the city. But outside the Ring Road, the world opened up. Suddenly there were fields everywhere. The roads disappeared, save for the single road that led south to Godawari, which ended at the base of the hills that surround the Kathmandu Valley. The air was cleaner, people walked slower, and I started to see many homes made of hardened mud.
When the paved road ended, we turned onto a small dirt road and took it a short distance. Hari stopped in front of a brick wall. There was a single blue metal gate leading into the compound. He lifted my backpack out of the back, and held it while I put it on, strapping the waist buckle. With a hearty handshake, he bade me farewell, wished me luck, and climbed back into the jeep. He backed out the way we had come in.
I watched Hari drive away, then turned back to the blue metal gate that led into the Little Princes Children’s Home.
I hadn’t realized until that moment how much I did not want to walk through that gate. What I wanted was to tell people I had volunteered in an orphanage. Now that I was actually here, the whole idea of my volunteering in this country seemed ludicrous. This had not been lost on my friends back home, a number of whom had gently suggested that caring for orphans might not be exactly what God had in mind for me. They were right, of course. I stood there and tried to come up with even a single skill that I possessed that would be applicable to working with kids, other than the ability to pick up objects from the floor. I couldn’t recall ever spending time around kids, let alone looking after them.
I took a deep breath and pushed open the gate, wondering what I was supposed to do once I was inside.
As it turns out, wondering what you’re supposed to do in an orphanage is like wondering what you’re supposed to do at the running of the bulls in Spain—you work it out pretty quickly. I carefully closed the gate behind me, turned, and stared for the first time at a sea of wide-eyed Nepali children staring right back at me. A moment passed as we stared at one another, then I opened my mouth to introduce myself.
Before I could utter a word I was set upon—charged at, leaped on, overrun—by a herd of laughing kids, like bulls in Pamplona.
The Little Princes Children’s Home was a well-constructed building by Nepalese standards: it was concrete, had several rooms, an indoor toilet (huzzah!), running water—though not potable—and electricity. The house was surrounded by a six-foot-high brick wall that enclosed a small garden, maybe fifty feet long by thirty feet wide. Inside the walls, half the garden was used for planting vegetables and the other half was, at least in the dry season, a hard dirt patch where the children played marbles and other games that I would come to refer to as Rubber Band Ball Hacky Sack
and I Kick You.
All games ceased immediately when I stepped through the gate. Soon I was lugging not only my backpack but also several small people hanging off me. Any chance of making a graceful first impression evaporated as I took slow, heavy steps toward the house. One especially small boy of about four years old hung from my neck so that his face was about three inches from my face and kept yelling Namaste, Brother!
over and over, eyes squeezed shut to generate more decibels. In the background I saw two volunteers standing on the porch, chuckling happily as I struggled toward them.
Hello!
cried the older one, a French woman in her late twenties who I knew to be Sandra, the founder of Little Princes. "Welcome! That boy hanging on your